Saturday, 14 April 2012

I have had the fantastic Brian Nelson plastic Nurgle Lord model from Games Workshop sitting on my painting desk for a few months now, partially assembled and waiting for some attention. The problem was, I knew I wanted to convert him - I can't seem to not convert a model these days - but I didn't know what I wanted to do to him and was hesitant to start cutting him up only to regret it.

Anyway, I had some extra time off from work over the Easter weekend last week and I decided to just sit down and work on some models since I had been in a bit of a lull of late. Shrugging off my earlier hesitations, I decided to start working on the Nurgle Lord figure, despite the absence of a clear idea in my head for how the finished piece should look.

While this is quite unusual for me, the process was quite liberating as I wasn't frustrating myself by trying to work too precisely towards an image in my head.

The end result of a few hours work is what you can see below. I clipped off the horns on the shoulder pad and turned them into disease ridden pustules. I added the crow from the Empire General kit, with a little conversion and tidying up, to return some height and attention to the area and also to create some visual lines through what is otherwise quite a 2D pose.

The head received the most sculpting work to create a hideous face, half covered by a helmet with horn bursting through. The rest of the work composed of adding some rivet detail to flat armour plates (rivets always catch rust well so they would help work some contrast in when it came time to paint) and to tidy up areas of soft detail due to the limitations of plastic casting.

All in all, I am pretty pleased with how he has turned out. While not radically different from the original sculpt (I don't think he needed to be anyway - the original is was an instant classic) he is different enough to be unique, which is what I was going for.

I used a mix of ProCreate and Milliput putties (about 50:50) for the face/helmet sculpting, ProCreate on its own for the horn and Milliput for the armour plate fixes.

All in, not bad for a few hours work I think. I will be painting him up in the coming weeks. I picked up a few of the new GW paints to test them out so will try to provide my thoughts on these two in the next few posts as I work on the model.

I've actually been testing out some Liquid Greenstuff on this guy too in place of my usual diluted Mr Surfacer for smoothing tiny joins between putty and plastic. I have to say I am impressed. While there is less control in some respects than Mr Surfacer provides, the ability to dilute with water makes the process much quicker.

I'm tempted to add an extra couple of little sculpted details just to really put my mark on this one but still debating what these should be.

Looks great, anxious to see him with some paint. I had the same problem with my own Lord, I got him at the end of last year, and he sat on my shelf till only a few weeks ago. Then I turned him into a BSB.